As funny and horrible as life itself

In 1992 Richard Ford, one of contemporary fiction's finest writers - and readers - decided to take a look at US short fiction. He took as his starting-point the year 1944 and worked his way through to the early 1990s. The Granta Book of the American Short Story gathers together 43 examples of short fiction at its best, each an endorsement of the quality and diversity of the literature it represents. Among the usual suspects included are the obvious greats such as John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Bernard Malamud, Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme and Tobias Wolff, but even more important are the less well-known masters shrewdly selected, such as Peter Taylor, Richard Bausch - and Richard Yates.

Among Yates's seven novels, Revolutionary Road, published in 1961, was praised by critics. Yet few good writers have slipped from the literary canon quite as thoroughly as has Yates, a New Yorker who died in 1992, just a year before the Irish writer, Maeve Brennan, with whom he shares the tragedy of being lost and rediscovered after death.

Two collections of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love, were published during his life, itself a battle between tuberculosis, alcoholism and manic depression. This valuable new volume brings them together, along with nine previously unpublished stories that in fairness do not add much to his legacy. The voice of New York runs through his work, but even more interesting is the theme of failure, particularly an awareness of failure - most of Yates's characters dislike themselves too much to even bother hiding behind lies and dreams. One character dogged by failure decides early in life that his greatest moment or "the zenith of romance" for him would always be the point where he fell dead clutching his heart as a nine-year-old in a game of cops and robbers. It is the sort of tragic comic observation that shapes Yates's fiction.

His terrified men and defiant women are all convincing in their fear and anger. Many of these stories will stay in the memory because of, rather than in spite of the fact that Yates is not a polished writer. There is no sense of his having worked and reworked each narrative. Instead they create the impression of his having watched each drama unfold, causing him to write them down while the pain, shock and uncomfortable clarity was still sharp.

It is interesting to see that Ford chose the title story, 'Liars in Love', for his anthology. Not only is it a fine piece, it is also one of the few narratives that ends on a hopeful note. In it, a young husband and father has come to an alien London on a Fulbright scholarship. He and his wife are living with her aunt. But their marriage is faltering. When the wife decides to return to the US, Warren fulfils a fantasy he had years before as a serviceman. The re- sulting exploration of need and self-deception is so real you can taste it, so much so that after all the turmoil Warren experiences, it is possible to believe in the ending, with its sense that things will get better, at least for a while.

Yates was a realist whose notions of romance had all too often been slapped in the face. When a character, one of several tubercular men, attempts writing to a beloved daughter who has now retreated into an unhappy pregnancy, all he can say with certainty is: "Your old dad may not be good for much any more, but he does know a thing or two about life and especially one important thing and that is" - the letter goes no further. Yates catches characters on the point of realisation when confusion is finally understood.

Hospital wards, reluctant army life and down-market newspaper offices manned by struggling reporters are as much his stage as the strange wars that pass for relationships. The strongest stories, with the exception of 'A Glutton for Punishment', are all contained within the Liars in Love collection. Elizabeth Hogan Baker, in 'Trying Out for the Race', "wrote feature stories for a chain of Winchester County newspapers through all the years of the Depression". Yates records that "she was on the road every day in a rusty, quivering Model A Ford that she drove fast and carelessly, often squinting in the smoke of a cigarette held in one corner of her lips . . . this wasn't the life she had planned for herself at all".

Initially it seems Yates is describing a heroine of sorts. Elizabeth is divorced and, aside from work, all she has at the end of most days is to "go home to an upstairs apartment . . . and pretend to take pleasure in her child". The sheer brutality of the piece is conveyed through a layer of facts. She then takes up a house-share offer made by Lucy, another mother on her own, and continues to bulldoze her way through life. Truth is offered through the eyes of a bewildered maid: "She had never worked in a house like this before, and didn't want to again. A nice lady , a crazy lady , and three sad-looking kids: what kind of a house was that? Well, it would most likely be over soon - she had already put the agency on the lookout for a new job - but meanwhile somebody ought to shut that crazy lady's mouth before she scolded that little girl to death."

'Regards at Home' could be Yates's finest story. Written in a candid first person, Bill Grove, the narrator, harbours no illusions about himself or his life, but would prefer other people not to know the truth. Many lies are told by the characters in these stories, but Grove, another of Yates's aspiring writers, is a liar with a strong grasp of the truth. "I had my mother to take care of" has become his preferred excuse for failures. Early in his friendship with an office colleague, he finds himself talking too much and decides "I had better watch my mouth around Dan Rosenthal".

Yates brilliantly provides what seems the groundwork for adultery, but instead the heart of the story is his relationship with his mother, "a bewildered, rapidly ageing, often hysterical woman who had always considered herself a sculptor with at least as much intensity as I brought to the notion of myself as a writer".

The story is as funny and as horrible as life itself. Grove's deadpan descriptions of his mother's antics, culminating in her decision to perform a party piece based on a radio commercial advertising bananas, eventually lead him to announce: "She was 57 years old. It had often occurred to me that she was crazy . . . but I think it must have been that night, or very soon afterwards, that I decided to get out".

Yates does not possess Updike's fluid grace, Bellow's urgent vision nor Cheever's elegant rage. The frenetic charm is far re- moved from Maxwell's elegiac feel for atmosphere. Yet throughout these stories, several of which are very good, Yates not only catches the voices and dilemmas of ordinary people through his genius for characterisation, he confirms his place among the elite of US writers who have made the short story their own.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times